Saturday, February 26, 2011

864: If I were a predictable man, I would make this review about how I have seen this exact joke before--not the Carl-quality "exact joke" where it is "roughly the same formula," but the sort of exact joke where the setup and delivery are identically the same; to wit, "it's year X, where are my flying cars?" "you have a cell phone lulz" "OMG U R RITE." I could write the review about that, but I will spare you, because that much is patently obvious. (I am obviously far too lazy to find where this exact joke was told, but if anyone else recalls it, please provide the link.)

No, I wish to write to you of Megan's milk-faucets once again. You see, Randy has decided, for no apparent reason whatsoever, that this conversation should feature a topless Megan. She could just as easily have said, using Randall's brilliant artwork as cover, "before I interrupted you with this video call." But instead, the video call was thwarted by her boobliness. "I am not wearing a shirt and that is why I am making this not a video call. I know that you think only of the sweet life-giving fluid that flows from my delicate pink nipples, and that is why you cannot look at me. I guess I just sit around naked and can't put a shirt on to do the things I want, because I have no agency when you are not around, Randall. Help me." This is what she is saying.

You will note that I emphasized "apparent" earlier. The real reason for this reveal has appeared in the very next comic. This leads us to...

865: Were it not for 864 and its brilliance, we would not have known that these two science-women are floating in space all sexy-like because they are naked! Randy may have a lactation fetish, and of course he loves the idea of milk-vessels jiggling around without gravity, but he knows his sci-fi nerd's erotic fantasies as well as anyone: naked science ladies in space!!! Is there nothing better???

There is, of course, something better: naked science ladies in space coupled with a joke about IPv6 and devouring nanobots. Truly, Randall has surpassed himself this time around--as he has done 863 times in the past.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Comic 862. Randall is a simple creature. In order to distract himself from his endless lust for Megan and her milk buttons, he has a simple set of routines--more rituals, really--that he repeats endlessly throughout the day. Over the course of his troubled life, these rituals have come to provide him comfort on their own, and so their original purpose is forgotten. They have become his security blankets, endlessly checking the internet for updates.

Every so often, however, Randall decides that he is a grown-up and has outgrown the need for security blankets. He spends the entire day saying to himself, "this is the last time I am going to check Reddit to see if they have added any new comments praising my latest comic. No, THIS is the last time I am going to check Reddit etc etc."

Eventually he manages to wrench himself from the endless cycle, but it is too late to make a comic now! Fortunately he has just watched the popular nerd movie "Star Trek"--the original, not the JJ Abrams remake. Nerds love "Star Trek," and nerds are the only people who read XKCD. Nerds also love when people mention things that they love. So, finding a vaguely appropriate "Star Trek" quote, he called it a day.

Comic 863. I have seriously never been so bored with a comic as I was with this one. It is only noteworthy because Randy seems to be abusing the type of person that he pretends to be (someone who is interested in everything and, of course, an expert in everything), and because Randy's idea of a joke is to drop a bunch of names. Next?

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

[Comic title: Never Do This; alt text: I call Rule 34 on The Secret House.]

Did you know that the skin under you fingernails is so mind-numbingly gross under the microscope that it causes both Randy of the notoriously fragile psyche and Megan-Who-Can-Do-No-Wrong to curl up into a fetal position muttering "oh god oh god" as if they've seen some hideous Lovecraftian horror? It's true!

It must be pretty bad, because none of these things made me do that. But I guess I'm kind of a Lovecraftian horror myself.

Friday, February 11, 2011

[I ordered a package from ebay and instead of the Megan real doll I ordered, it contained a bobcat called "Bobcat" with the following guest review in its mouth. Weird, right? -Ed.]

So. I’ve been watching this blog for months now, and I’ve never felt the need to do a guest review.

Guess what? THERE IS A FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING.

Now, when I checked the comic, at first I thought something had gone horribly wrong (or perhaps, given that I couldn’t see a comic, horribly right). Horror dawned upon me as I realized that this was no glitch. I was seeing exactly what Randall wanted me to see.

There is no art. Complain as much as you like about the charts and graphs, but they at least take time. Complain about badly delivered jokes told by interchangeable stick figures, but at least they function as a semblance of a comic. As much as we complain that he obviously drew something in a five minute panic before midnight, at least when he has five minutes he DRAWS SOMETHING. Since XKCD is a COMIC. I can’t say that the writing is worse than usual, but the complete lack of a stick figure or a graph is just plain INSULTING. This took 30 seconds to conceive and produce.

Randall clearly has no respect for his audience. You know, the audience whose dollars keep him fed, clothed and with night vision goggles with which to view Megan from outside the 500 yards of the restraining order (obligatory Megan joke, check). I think he did, once, but that’s debatable. And why should he? No matter what he churns out, no matter how banal, how humorless, how elitist, how lazy, his fans will sing his praises.

"GOOMH, Randall! I too am a loser who feels deeply unsettled by incomplete punctuation! How did you know that?"

Because YOU GOOMH ABOUT EVERYTHING. He could write a comic about medieval Occitan romantic poetry (not that he would, since it’s the evil LIBERAL ARTS) and the audience would say, "Hey, I’ve heard of Poetry! GOOMH, RANDALL!"

After this, I’m not even sure I’ll want to keep checking this blog. Folks, I keep thinking we’ve hit the bottom of the barrel, and then I realize that we left the barrel somewhere back at comic 400. We are now burrowing through the ground beneath the barrel. We have pierced the septic tank, kept digging through, and are now beneath the septic tank.

And yet, Randall keeps digging, even as gravity has its way with the contents of the septic tank right over his head. Do we REALLY want to keep following him? Can it GET worse than a comic told via the complete ABSENSE of a comic?

Also, in case Randall or anyone who is OCD enough to go "OMG, GOOMH, RANDALL" reads what I have to say . . . I close with this.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

[TITLE: Milk; ALT TEXT: It's not hard when you have the same thought like 40 or 50 percent of the time.]

Randall Munroe is a troubled man. His mind is filled with thoughts of nipples, all the time (let's not kid ourselves; the alt text is lowballing it). He wants to put them in his mouth. And when he does, he wants them to provide him with sweet, milky sustenance. Mostly the nipples he thinks of are Megan's, of course, but even Randy's obsession with Megan pales compared to the thoughts that course through his mind, unbidden and unwelcome. And everyone around him knows. They must, or why would the world be so full of reminders? "Villains!" he shrieked. "Dissemble no more! Tear off the shirt. Here! Here! It is the oozing of her delicious milky breasts!"

At first he tried to dismiss these thoughts as other and strange, as evidenced in comic 275, where he worries about telling the parents of his completely fictional girlfriend (perhaps the comic predates Megan, who can say?) that he lives only to put his mouth on her sensitive pink milk buttons. These thoughts were "the weirdest thoughts." They were to be suppressed, shunned, kept silent. And for a long time, he succeeded. He shifted his fixation onto Megan, and with a forced laugh and a grin that lingered just a moment too long, he told nerdy jokes. Only the pained look in his eye when he saw a breast, the way his gaze would follow the jiggly milk-potentials, betrayed his inner thoughts.

But eventually the strain was too much for his psyche. Perhaps it was the realization that he could lust for the life-giving fluid that came from Megan's breasts that did it. he could suppress it no longer--God (or, rather, the uncaring universe that only dumb dumbheads think has a god in it--this is still Randall Munroe we're talking about) made him with these crippling neuroses and sexual fixations for a reason! and he would not be ashamed of who he is!

But to be Randall Munroe is to be ashamed. all his life he has been at conflict with himself--the part with an oral fixation that only wants to lap up milk and vaginal fluids, and the white knight who thinks that sexual desire is inherently wrong and finds that imagining women sexually damages his image of them as perfect and pure--and that conflict continues. What was meant as a loving paean to milk-slurping turned on itself, became a twisted mirror of itself. In it, Megan shatters his dreams, as she shatters them so often before, and, as always, he can find nothing but praise for her in so doing. but it's the alt text where Randall truly subverts himself: here he reveals, with the terrifying self-awareness that only those wallowing deep in the pits of denial can exhibit, that this is his only thought. She is not amazing for guessing it. she is only cynically exploiting his fragile, pathetic mind. And it is fragile, and it is pathetic. He knows this, he affirms this, even as he attempts to affirm himself:

I am Randall Munroe, and I just want to lick milk from your boobies! I will not be ashamed!

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

The first question I believe I should answer in this "review" is: why? Because every vermin has his day and, really, why not? I'm working on the assumption, of course, that absolutely anything is better than Rob's ramblings about Randall's/his infinite and frustrated love for this mythical figure named Megan. Oh, shoot, now this review will be completely about Megan just because I mentioned her name twice in the first paragraph! RUINED FOREVER!!!1!1one!

...have you noticed I'm completely nuts already? Good, this will save some time!

But(!) Let's not waste any more time with moley ramblings. To the comic!

[Title: Archimedes; Alt-text: Give a man a fish, or he'll destroy the only vial of antidonte.]

My hatred for xkcd fluctuates a lot. It's usually at a minimum, then raises when I notice Randall actually makes money off this lazy heap of shit. It raises more when Randall pulls off obvious references instead of attempting any real humor, and then some more when Randall ruins a perfectly good comic with a stupid punchline or PPD. Notice I did not provide any links for these occurences because, frankly, I don't give a damn. But there was one goddamn strip that made my blood boil.

"Joshing". By the great old mole in the sky, isn't that a horrible lazy piece of crap that couldn't even count for an excuse of a comic! That's when any sort of sympathy I had for Randall suddenly sublimated and I realized not even he takes this as seriously as his related economical enterprises could suggest. It's this sort of comic we're talking about here! And the reason I'm bringing up this piece of shit is because... what, arey you blind? Look at this comic! It's the same goddamn shit!

This new comic has nothing good to offer. It has no interesting art(wow, Randall, a stick figure talking over white background, what a feat!), no effort(HEADS. NECKS. AT LEAST CONNECT THEM, RANDALL!), no humor(for someone ranting about "trochee humor", Randall sure loves to cater to the internet's love for all things random, don't he?), no cleverness(...repeat what I said in the last parenthesis)... nothing except: a)a nerd-ish reference; and b)a RANDOM LOL non-sequitur. And then the alt-text joins in, because apparently this is hilarious. Then I suppose Randall picked up a Mad-libs book and started filling all the blanks with "penis". Oh, Randall, you're on fire!

I don't think this comic can be fixed in any way that's not "trash it and start all over again", so let's end this review with a treat for any xkcd fan here to berate us with stupid responses to criticism: RANDOM NON-SEQUITUR-ED FAMOUS QUOTES!

- Love is the law, love under death penalty. ~Aleister Crowley- Follow me; and let the dead raise from their graves and start the Zombie Apocalypse. ~Jesus- My prodigious sin was, and still is, stealing that non-descript object from a dying woman's house. ~Charlie Chaplin- Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is an IMI Uzi. ~Isaac Newton- If I have seen further it is only by looking through a sniper scope. ~Isaac Newton again because... why not?

Enough! This is so incredibly dumb I should start a shitty webcomic and sell shirts with these on. I'll probably be filthy rich in a month!

Thursday, February 3, 2011

[I was just burning incense at my shrine to Megan, picturing her naked flesh (as lovingly depicted in 631) being penetrated by Randall's member (sadly not depicted in 631), when suddenly an angel appeared and was all like, "hey, you have an email." It was from some poor, naive creature called "Suiseiseki" or some shit. I think maybe it's a guest post? I have no idea, I always do what I'm told when I'm on my vision quests. -Ed.]

I will begin by saying that I have never been as filled with hate for xkcd as I currently am. Comic 856 is, as far as I can remember, the worst of Randall’s work, with the few obvious exceptions (the vagina thing and the Mr. Hat sighing thing…). This comic fails in so many places…and yet, should all of these things be fixed, 856 might have forced at least a smile from me, instead of receiving the cold, dead eyes of scorn that I gazed upon my screen with. (I would not have done more than smile…the joke was pretty bad. I have low standards, just like Randall.)

I’ll start with the bad things, because that’s what you guys like I guess, and because you’ll stop reading this like halfway through or something.

First, the reader is assaulted by this:

What the fuck, Randall? You could have shrunk the font size down to make it fit in that second panel. You could have shortened the text. You could have done anything, ANYTHING but that. I had to look at that three times in order to understand what the fuck was going on. This is just...retarded. This alone would have fucked up this comic to the point that one could reasonably write an angry rant about it. It wouldn't be terribly long, but it would be an angry rant.

Second, this other shit:

That asterisk should have gone at the end of that sentence. When someone sees an asterisk, they want to figure out what the fuck that asterisk points to, damnit. I, being me, stopped reading the sentence, read what the asterisk said, went back up to the sentence and got lost. With most audiences, this wouldn’t be a massive issue. However, Randall’s audience is typically a bit autistic, so this serves only to confuse the machine that these people’s brains are. A mistake like this is kind of meh with most audiences: with people who will probably smash the screen when they get confused, this is a fatal error. Don't do this shit, Randall: You know your audience better than that.

Now that I’m done bitching about the way in which 856 is formatted, I can begin bitching about the ways in which 856 fails in essence.

First, who the fuck is that guy? He’s obviously not a loving father or anything; he seems to support bashing the kid’s brains in with a brick. Nor is he a Doctor; he doesn’t know what the hell Dr. Megan’s talking about when she plans to reprogram the girl’s brain. He doesn’t fit in the comic at all. He’s just…there. Seriously, take him out of the comic, erase his lines, and modify Megan’s text just a little. The comic works JUST AS WELL.

Second, Randall seems to have forgotten a punchline. It exists, I could underline it…It’s even the last line, so there isn’t any “post-punchline dialogue.” However, it is so utterly lame that it seems like there isn’t even a punchline. The essence of it is, “I’m going to kill this kid with a brick because she’s so annoying.” That’s all. There’s no punch to it. It just…sucks.

Now, in order to be "fair and balanced" like faux n00z, I should point out the things that Randall has done well. Feel free to stop reading here: you probably don’t care about anything past this line.

First, Randall seems to be trying to do the “Show, don’t tell” thing. This would have been reasonably effective had the joke not been lame. He even took the time to draw the annoying girl with curly hair, a diagram that shows roughly what is going on in the girl’s brain, a machine that looks like it does what Randall says it does, the girl waking up…There is clearly an amount of effort going on here. He could have draw the girl getting laz0red or something, but still, he definitely deserves credit for trying.

Second, he captures the essence of these annoying little bastards reasonably well. If you’ve not yet had the misfortune of dealing with one of these people…let’s just say, it isn’t nice. They’re annoying, unfunny, and they make you want to…well, get a brick. The XXDDDD SO RANDUM crowd deserves this type of depiction, and thankfully, they get it. Sadly, they get it from Randall.

That’s all. Seeing as this is an actual review, there’ll be a few of you who really enjoy reading this, despite the fact that it isn’t incredifunny. Yeah, I’ve probably missed a fuckton of cheap shots (I haven’t slammed Randall for making Megan significantly smarter than him, for example.) But, whatever. Enjoy reading Rob laugh at Randall for having a small dick and assburgers and creepy and gay fanfiction and stuff next time.

[One thing I'd like to point out, fundie that I am: note that Randy is asserting that obsession with Jesus is a form of brain damage. Just throwing that out there. -Ed.]

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

When rejected by Megan, Randall often turns to the internet for solace. As an internet afficionado, he has heard of this "The Social Network" movie, and the book of faces it is presumably about, and conceived of a hypothetical scenario for instructive purposes:

"Wouldn't it be hilarious if Social Network was about ZomboCom?"

As this comic handily demonstrates: no, no it wouldn't. A successful experiment all round.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

[Comic title: Learning to Cook; alt text: "And yet I never stop thinking, 'sure, these ingredients cost more than a restaurant meal, but think how many meals I'll get out of them! Especially since each one will have leftovers!'"]

Randy's inability to get Megan to go on a date with him has left him feeling sad and alone at mealtimes these days. Food is nothing more than a sad necessity to Randy, who makes sure to light the candles every night at mealtime, and only takes himself out to the places recommended on CitySearch or Yelp as great date spots, sadly murmuring, "one day, Megan, one day."

For a man like Randy, cooking has always been one of those things that he deeply wishes he could do, being as he is simultaneously lonely, useless, and possessed with an itinerant fascination in all things DIY (until he realizes that DIY still means "do it yourself" and that "do it yourself" means work). But being as he is useless, talentless and lazy (much like your editor, in fact), every effort to cook ends in failure.

Like a Darren Aronofsky film, every step of the road to cooking is fraught with failure where it ought to succeed. Buying ingredients costs more somehow. His cooking is at best kind of acceptable. And when hunger comes round again, the yearning for pizza overwhelms him. He dials some cheap pizza company and orders a pizza. And the pizza remains tasty for days, while his cooking festers in the fridge, mocking him. "You could never make me as good as your pizza," the leftovers whisper, and Randy knows this to be true.

And he could cook again, of course, but what would be the point? Already he has fallen into a cycle of failure and discarded his sad attempts at sustaining himself. No, his heart belongs to the pizza-industrial complex. The rest of his ingredients occupy space in his fridge until they, too, finally rot and make the last pilgrimage to the dumpster. And months later, with his failure forgotten, or with the deluded belief that he can change, he can do better now, he tries again.

At long last, Randall decides to document his failures with a flowchart. But it is a flowchart bereft of humor--this flowchart represents the sad prison Randall Munroe now occupies. There are no choices. There is only an endless cycle of failure. In the end, Randall Munroe can't even sustain himself.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Rob's Rants

When he's not flipping a shit over prescriptivist and descriptivist uses of language, xkcdsucks' very own Rob likes writing long blocks of text about specific subjects. Here are some of his excellent refutations of common responses to this site. Think of them as a sort of in-depth FAQ, for people inclined to disagree with this site.